It might have sounded like a lead-in to a Jay Leno joke, but it wasn't.

My cardiologist, Dr. Jack Howard, and I had been talking about The Standard-Times summer series, "Building Better Schools." (Today's installment is about a school district in El Paso, Texas, and future installments will focus on systems in Houston and Long Beach, Calif., as well as a few that are closer to home.)

I explained the central premise: Many other districts in cities across the country face problems similar to the ones we face in New Bedford — lots of kids from poor families and single-parent homes, lots who don't speak English very well, lots who are from racial or ethnic minorities. And some of those districts are succeeding nonetheless: graduating more students, scoring better on statewide achievement tests, seeing lower dropout rates, having better attendance.

Those are the school districts we sent education reporter Charis Anderson to find. We didn't want to visit wealthy suburban districts where most parents are deeply involved in their children's educations, where per-pupil spending gives wealthy schools a big advantage. We wanted school districts that had the same struggles, had faced the same failures and had done something about them — had found answers that worked.

There is no single right answer for every child, every teacher and every school, but all of the districts we visited had something to offer, some lesson to teach educators and elected leaders in New Bedford. And that is what we hope will be the legacy of this project of ours.

In last week's story about her North Carolina trip, Anderson wrote about a school district where the best principals are often transferred to the most troubled schools, allowed to bring along a small group of staff from a prior assignment, and told to go to work. They get lots of freedom and significant rewards for being successful.

In this week's installment about a district in El Paso, we meet school leaders who relentlessly use information to identify students at risk of failing and to address the needs of those students individually so that they won't just give up and quit. We meet leaders like Principal Lucy Borrego, who put it this way:

"Something that I've always believed in is that all kids, all kids will meet our expectations. It doesn't matter whether they're ADHD, whether they have divorced parents, whether they come from a broken home, whether their parents have never had any education. ... I tell (my teachers), 'Do not accept excuses, and do not make excuses.' I don't care if (students) have three eyes, I don't care if they're missing a leg, I don't care, I don't care. They have to be successful, and it's our responsibility to make sure they're successful, and we can't make excuses for them."

A little over a week ago, I sat through a meeting between the New Bedford School Committee and a small group of officials from the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, which had issued a scathing review of an assessment team's findings about New Bedford schools.

I don't know what kind of response the state officials get elsewhere, but here they got a 26-page brief from the mayor challenging most of the state's methods and findings, a complaint from the head of the local teachers' union that the union leadership hadn't been given a copy of the report in advance of its release to the public, and School Committee members who said their feelings had been hurt by the negative tone of the state evaluation, which found the city's schools lacking in all six key areas it measured.

"Do you know how discouraging it is for people in New Bedford to read this report?" one board member asked rhetorically.

Another complained that the state education department would have called Red Sox legend Ted Williams, who once batted over .400, a failure because he made an out three times out of every five at-bats.

But baseball is a poor analogy for what's happening here, and hurt feelings aren't the point.

After all, this isn't about a Little League coach being too tough on his team. If there are self-esteem issues, then the best way to make everyone feel better is to improve student performance.

Every student, teacher and school board member would feel a lot better about themselves if the district were graduating 90 percent of its students instead of the 53 percent it graduates now. Nobody's feelings would be hurt if our dropout rate was 10 percent instead of more than 30 percent. All of us would feel better if the state had found more than "pockets of excellence" within a system that overall is "quite weak" and where the rate of student growth is among the worst in the state, even compared to similar urban school districts.

So I guess what I want to tell my cardiologist is this: While New Bedford shares a lot of the same problems as districts in Charlotte, N.C., and El Paso, Texas, it also must learn to share the same faith in its students as Principal Lucy Borrego, who believes failure is not an option for the children in her care.

Do we have that kind of faith?

Because unless we do, we will always be willing to point fingers at the state for setting the bar too high, at the parents who don't care for their children as much as we think they should, and at the students who bring every kind of family and social problem with them into the classroom.

Unless we have faith as strong as Borrego's, we'll never get anywhere. Twenty years from now our schools will suffer from what the state calls the same "systemic issues" that afflict them now.

Unless we practice that faith, our kids will continue to drop out, to work for next to nothing in dead-end jobs, and we'll all still be looking for someone else to blame.

Bob Unger is the editor and associate publisher of The Standard-Times. He can be reached by email at runger@s-t.com or by phone at 508-979-4430.